Leo Gura

Don't confuse Nothingess/Absolute/God/Consciousness with scientific ideas of nothingness. Two totally different domains.

@The Monk No, it means less low-consciousness friends. Nothing says you can't go out and make high-consciousness friends. Of course you'll have to stop taking the process of acquiring friends for granted. Up until now, you had an unconscious process for finding friends. Now you need to create a conscious process for finding friends.

Of course your work has to be exceptional. But even exceptional work can not be enough. And exceptional work still has to fit some kind of market need. Music is easy to market because it's free, short, low cost to produce, and everyone loves music. It's a massive pop-culture market. Even niche music is still massively popular because it demands so little of the listener. It's like comedy in that regard. Everyone loves good comedy. Because it's naturally easy to like. Not so with many other types of art. Good luck making a living off a sculpture the same way you might with a good song. To accomplish that will take some real innovative strategy. But yes, mastering your craft and finding your unique voice is critical for any artist. The trick is that it's hard to master something unless one experiences some degree of early success to make it a sustainable practice. You can't afford to spend 10 years mastering your craft without selling anything. So you need to design a bootstrap process, which will allow you to develop mastery plus publish some value to the marketplace.

Those people are fools. Don't worry, life will slap them for their foolishness Classic spiritual mistake: finding spirituality and thinking that it obviates practical thinking. You must be both spiritual and practical, idealistic and realistic. As always, people suck at balance, so they take sides and bicker. You must be BOTH! Do your art, but don't get so artsy-fartsy you lose touch with ordinary people or ordinary reality. I've had to sell my soul to the devil a lot to succeed. If I never did that, you would never have heard of me or found Actualized.org. Success is a pragmatic issue. If you care about it, you must make certain sacrifices. You can't just create whatever kind of bullshit you fancy. That's way too easy. You must take others into account as well. But without selling out. Your art ain't doing much good if no one can access it. Of course, if you wanna be a starving, misunderstood artist, go right ahead. Nothing wrong with that per se. Personally, not my cup of tea though. For me, it's important that my work has a sizable impact on people and that I am reasonably compensated.

Another good question to ponder is: What are the components of a successful intimate relationship? Yeah, there are a lot of different angles you could come at this question from. Some angles are more metaphysical, others are more practical. Both are good. They feed into each other. So there's plenty to contemplate. I like this idea of collective contemplation. It's a good use of this forum. If you guys are interested, what we could do is create a set of contemplation threads for the specific purpose of collective contemplation. For example: What is creativity? What is love? What is science? etc. These threads would have some ground rules so that people actually contribute contemplative answers, and not just speculation or talking-shit. And then we could have one master sticky thread which links to all the different contemplation sub-threads. Is that something ya'll would be interested in?

@Vanish I can imagine storing LSD in India was a sketchy affair.

@Loreena Of course! Your butt is not gonna wipe itself Every detail must be accounted for no matter how enlightened you are.

Yup, been there before Welcome to evolved-living. Where you unmoor yourself and take charge of your own destiny.

@ShadowWalker No, actually the difference is much more pragmatic. Starving artists starve because they don't invest energy in learning marketing or bothering to market themselves. Just doing great art is NOT good enough. You must learn your audience and learn to appeal to them and lure them in. Artist-types usually suck at this, which is why most of them are starving. You must be wiser than that. You must reconcile the problem of how to market yourself without selling your soul in the process. Success requires ruthless pragmatism. Not wishful thinking. But you can still be a visionary. A highly pragmatic visionary.

@ajs That is fine, but your challenge in this work will then be to find a way to harness the emotion contained in those sports experiences and put it to productive, creative use. I'm sure it can be done. But you'll have to think a bit outside the box. Meaning... it won't be as simple as saying, "Okay, I get a thrill out of playing golf. So that means I should be a professional golfer or golf coach." No! You need to think deeper and connect more dots. What does the thrill of golf say about the kind of impact you want your creative work to have on people? "Creative work" and also be interpreted broadly. For example, someone like Bear Grylls does creative work. But it's not your typical idea of creative work. It's more kinesthetic. You sound like a kinesthetic person, so you'll need a life purpose which feeds into and off of that. Find a way to make it creative rather than competitive. Competitive sports are shallow and short-lived. You gotta find a way to build something with your activity.

@5thPablo You'll never understand until you're there. Once you're there, you'll laugh at how you could think anything else could have been even remotely true. The problem is, you've never yet experienced the possibility of an ABSOLUTE reality. Absolute means, God himself could not make it otherwise. It's true under all conditions, for eternity! Such a thing is completely outside the realm of any human experience. No human you've ever personally known has experienced truth at such a profound level. So to you it is unimaginable. Which is why I keep insisting on radical openmindedness.

Here's some food for thought for ya guys: Are there any things which are unrelated to anything else? What is selecting out the objects which are said to be related? Why those two objects and not others? Are relationships only between sentient beings, or other things too? What does it mean to be in relationship with another thing?

@Saba That's a good start. Just keep at it. Ultimately you want to ponder: What is the substance of a relationship? Is it made out of matter? Energy? Concepts? People? What? Where does the relationship exist? Who is creating it? Etc. Don't necessarily expect some giant epiphany with all your questions. Sometimes you'll just get some minor insights and more clarity.

@Garuda Probably just bad LSD.

@LowPlanetary The first thing to understand is that that's YOU holding motivation that way. There's nothing inherently unstable about motivation. You just haven't found a way to tap into it. Stable motivation is the key to all success, and its foundation lies much better than merely getting yourself into a motivated state every morning. The way I solved the motivation issue in my life is by finding my life purpose and committing to it. My spiritual motivation has also been going through the roof lately because I'm slowly building it up in my mind as I talk about in the life purpose course. When you lay a deep foundation, the motivation tends to be quite stable. Your problem then will be too much motivation and so many different motivations that you don't have time for them all. It takes time to build up the momentum and go through the wobbly phases where you're up and down a lot.

@100rockets Desire for liberation is good. You need that. The key now is to channel it effectively rather than just to spout hot air. If you're serious, you can start by reforming your lifestyle. Clean it up. Make it conducive to enlightenment work. Start building the right habits, including mindfulness meditation, clean eating, cutting out TV and other addictions, visualizations, etc. Then you need to make sure you understand this path conceptually, and all of its traps. Which means lots of study. (See my book list for best enlightenment books). Then you will be ready to invest more and more time into self-inquiry. If you're serious, try doing a solo 7-day contemplation/meditation retreat. Plan it out well and spend 7 days straight in contemplation or meditation, with short breaks for eating and naps. This isn't rocket science. It's all very basic and common sense stuff. The trick is, you gotta actually do it. And your ego will create excuses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzimtzum I love this part especially: Dead-on descriptions of Absolute Infinity, clearly from direct experience.

@MissMiki You're wasting time with fantasy. You must tackle this head-on. Grasp WHAT you are right now! You're it right now! What is aware?

@MissMiki Will is just a feeling you have. You can deconstruct it. You don't really have it. Which is why you feel so weak and struggle so much with self-control. There is INFINITE variety! It doesn't stop. The phenomenal world (Maya) is infinitely complex. You are none of that. You are the emptiness within which Maya dances. What is aware of all the variety? What is aware of the feeling of will? There is nothing you can do within Maya to escape Maya. Because you are already free of Maya. You just have to grasp that.

Cool beans. What was your dose? Now go make that level of awakeness permanent. And it still goes deeper.

You'd be surprised. Some girls are not bothered by guy going to a strip club. Those would be the more secure girls. Needy girls will of course not be able to hand something like that, because they will perceive it as a threat. I like the kind of girl who I could take to a strip club with me and we both have fun. Good relationships require good communication ability, honesty, selflessness, and many other spiritual qualities. It's a huge topic of mastery. Mostly I keep to myself because I'm introverted and don't have much time or desire to socialize. But sometimes I do. Just depends on the situation. Developing the ability to socialize on the turn of a dime is good. Then you're free to be however you want in the moment. Up to you. If you're highly conscious, it will be difficult for you to be on the same wavelength as a low consciousness partner. So that will probably not work long-term. You'd want to find someone who is at least interested in growing themselves and learning from you.

@username Like attracts like

I spent last Monday chatting up strippers at a strip club with my enlightened buddy. I chatted to them about meditation, yoga, enlightenment, DMT, and normal everyday things for 2.5 hours. We all had great fun. One of the strippers even had a Sanskrit tattoo which I quickly identified. Another stripper was into meditation but drank too much to maintain a steady habit. I jokingly lectured her about her unhealthy drinking habits. A 3rd stripper wanted to try some DMT, and I educated her about the benefits of 5-meo and how my enlightened buddy was too big of a pussy to do a 30mg dose. Don't be so serious about being "spiritual" and developed. You should be able to relate to ordinary people once you're in touch with the being-level of life. It's all being after all. Everyone is at your level. You can learn to talk to people about anything. Just don't expect them to change or convert to your ways. And don't expect people to bring up the topics YOU want to talk about. That burden is on you as the conversationalist.

@Joel3102 Funny, isn't it, how you want to create a mechanical system for being more conscious? Why not just meditate and be conscious? Isn't it obvious when you're conscious and when you're mechanical?

You seek Sahaja Nirvikalpa Samadhi That will take some serious enlightening. If you have a cave nearby, might be a good idea to relocate there for a few years of meditatin'